Journal

Dear Reader,

Welcome to my journal.

I want to share with you why I have chosen to call this space a journal and a blog. It holds a deep significance for me and the purpose behind this platform.

Why a Journal?

A journal, in its essence, represents a sacred space of introspection, reflection, and authenticity. It is a place where thoughts and emotions flow freely, where one can document personal experiences and explore their inner world. An entry can hold an intimate connection with the writer’s soul. It offers a raw and unfiltered glimpse into their thoughts, struggles, and growth. In this context, a journal refers to an intimate and reflective platform where you chronicle your personal thoughts, experiences, and insights. It can also engage with the works and ideas of other writers from around the world. A journal serves as a space for deep contemplation, intellectual exploration, and meaningful conversations, encompassing a wide range of topics that resonate with you.

Many people write journals but never share them. They often write them, as I did between 2014 and 2022 as a way to deal with something in their lives at the time. Mine became the thesis of my Doctorate called An Autoethnographical Journal: The Death of a Son, and in 2023 it became the memoir Smiler. My research focused on how creative writing or keeping a journal can be used as therapy for dealing with grief.

Creative or Self Expressive Writing as a therapy.

Grief is a deeply personal and often overwhelming experience that accompanies the loss of a loved one. During this challenging time, finding effective coping mechanisms becomes essential. One such powerful tool that offers solace and healing is creative writing. In this post, I highlight some of the ways in which creative writing can help navigate the complex terrain of grief. Doing so, allows them to express, reflect, and find meaning through the written word.

1. Expressing Unspoken Emotions:
2. Grief brings forth a whirlwind of emotions that can be difficult to articulate verbally. Creative writing provides a safe haven, a sacred space where emotions can flow freely onto the page. Through poetry, journaling, or storytelling, individuals can give voice to their pain, sadness, anger, confusion, and all the intricate emotions that accompany their grieving process.
3. Reclaiming Personal Agency:
4. In the midst of grief, individuals often feel a sense of powerlessness and vulnerability. Engaging in creative writing offers an opportunity to reclaim a sense of control over their narrative. They can shape their thoughts, memories, and experiences into words, creating a tangible representation of their inner world. This process empowers individuals to actively navigate their grief journey, finding strength and resilience in their ability to create and express.
5. Reflection and Meaning-Making:
6. Writing provides a pathway to reflection and introspection. It invites individuals to explore their thoughts, memories, and the significance of their loss. Through writing, they can make meaning out of their grief, finding connections between their experiences and their personal beliefs or philosophies. It becomes a tool for self-discovery, offering insights into their own strengths and resilience amidst the pain.

Healing

1. Crafting Healing Narratives:
2. Crafting narratives through creative writing can be a cathartic and healing process. It allows individuals to shape and reframe their story of loss, finding solace in the act of creating something meaningful from their pain. By giving structure to their experiences, they can navigate the complexities of grief, identify personal growth, and discover newfound purpose or meaning arising from their journey.
3. Connection and Support:
4. Sharing creative writing within a supportive community fosters connection and empathy. When individuals share their written works, they often find understanding and validation from others who have experienced similar losses. Writing becomes a bridge of understanding, providing a space for communal healing and support. Engaging with others’ stories and experiences can bring a sense of belonging and alleviate the feelings of isolation that grief often brings.

Creative writing holds immense healing potential for individuals navigating the depths of grief. Expressive writing, especially a journal, can give individuals a voice to their emotions, reclaim personal agency, and reflect on their experiences. Writing your thoughts can craft healing narratives, and find connection within a supportive community. As each person’s grief is unique, exploring creative writing as a tool for healing offers an avenue of self-expression, self-discovery, and self-care during a time of profound loss. While creative writing can be a valuable tool for grief, it’s essential to seek professional support. If your grief becomes overwhelming or prolonged, don’t be embarrassed to contact your GP, mental health professionals or support groups. They are trained people who can provide additional guidance and assistance on your path to healing.

As a Writer.

As a journal writer, I hope to give myself the agency and the freedom to express my opinions. A journal will allow me to delve into diverse subjects, and explore the works of writers across different time periods and cultures. It is a place where I can share my own interpretations, reflections, and connections between my own personal experiences and the profound literary contributions of others. I hope it reflects the honesty and vulnerability that I want to share with you, particularly through my book on grief and the journey towards healing.

I’ve written a treatise on Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in it, I want to explore the philosophy and politics behind his writing of that. So, by embracing the term “journal,” I invite you into an intimate space where I document not just my own personal views, reflections, and insights, but those of other writers and artists, where I possibly can.

As a Biographer.

In this journal, I want to create a bridge between the thoughts and voices of writers from the past and present. I want to engage you in a dialogue that transcends time and geographical boundaries. It will become a space where I can celebrate the beauty of literature, gain inspiration from diverse perspectives, and share my own unique insights. I hope to bring a sense of intellectual camaraderie to readers who resonate with my passion for ideas and the written word.

Consequently, embracing the term ‘journal’, highlights the deep significance it holds in my personal healing process and for those that have gone before. More importantly, posts will include other writers and poets like Oscar Wilde and William Wordsworth from my series Poets, Politics and Philosophy. I invite you to join me on this introspective journey as we walk the dark corridors of grief, and other Trauma, analyse Poets their Politics and Philosophy and discuss the demise of Western Society in my forthcoming 2024 book called, The Fish Who Wanted To Run.  

Finally, thank you for being a part of this journal. I look forward to sharing the ups and downs, the insights and the revelations through my posts and through the pages of Grief and Other Minds by sharing example chapters with you.

With heartfelt gratitude,

Ian

You may not realise it but Beatrix Potter was the JK Rowling of her day. When she died on 22 December 1943, aged 77, she left £211,636, a value of about £12,600,000 in today’s money. She also bequeathed over 4000 acres of land to the National Trust, worth about £28,000,000 at today’s value. She also left 16 farms and cottages together with herds of cattle and flocks of Herdwick sheep. The copyright of all her works went firstly to her husband and then onto her favourite nephew, Norman Warne. Her legacy can be explored in her old farmhouse at Hill Top in Hawkshead through her illustrations at the Beatrix Potter Gallery or brought to life at the World of Beatrix Potter Attraction.

Beatrix Potter was born in South Kensington, Middlesex in 1866. She was aged 11 when she first visited the lakes with her family. She already had an interest in animals but it was from this visit that her interest in the Lake District began. It was during these family holidays, that the drawings she created were the inspiration for her most famous characters – Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Squirrel Nutkin and more – as well as many of the locations in her books.

On one of the family trips to the Lakes, they stayed at Wray Castle and did quite a bit of entertaining. Beatrix became friends with a local vicar, Cannon H. Rawnsley of Wray Church. Cannon H. Rawnsley, who had Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning within his circle of friends, would be a huge influence on Potter. It was Rawnsley, who would later encourage Beatrix to publish her first book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. He influenced Potter in other ways, later on in his life, he become one of the co-founders of the National Trust, in the battle to preserve the natural beauty of the Lake District. Although she holidayed in many other places, particularly Scotland, she remained in contact with Cannon H. Rawnsley. On returning home to London from her holidays she would make greeting cards of her pictures and eventually began making a book.

 

At the age of 27, Potters tried to publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit and sent it to Frederick Warne, a well-known publisher of children’s books. But it was returned by Warne and many other publishers also rejected it. In 1901 she found a printer and self-published 250 copies of the book for a total cost of £11. In 1902 it was picked up by Frederick Warne & Company who published it commercially with great success. In the next 20 years, she published a further 22 additional books, beginning with The Tailor of Gloucester (1903), The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903), and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904). The tiny books, which she designed so that even the smallest children could hold them. This was combined with simple prose, concealing dry North Country humour, with illustrations in the best English watercolour tradition.

Despite strong parental opposition, she became engaged in 1905 to Norman Warne, the son of her publisher, During the summer of 1905 and a few weeks into their engagement, he fell ill and died of leukaemia. After his sudden death, she spent much of her time alone at Hill Top, a small farm in the village of Sawrey that she had bought with the proceeds of a legacy and the royalties from her books. In 1909, with her income beginning to grow, she bought Castle Cottage, a property just across the road from Hill Top, using solicitors at the W. Heelis offices in Hawkshead which is now the National Trust’s “Beatrix Potter Gallery”.

In the 19th Century, there was no formal education for girls and Victorian values also precluded her from becoming a farmer, however, in 1913 she married her solicitor, William Heelis, and spent the last 30 years of her life extending her farm property portfolio and breeding Herdwick sheep. In 1923 she purchased Troutbeck Park Farm and the Monk Coniston Estate in 1930, which is situated a couple of miles northeast of Coniston.

Hilltop now had a farm manager who lived at one end of the property, and the part in which Beatrice lived, was left empty and her possessions remained exactly as she left them. This later became her personal museum with her possessions again, still as she left them. Beatrix was a passionate conservationist and as a farmer, she became best known for the breeding of Herdwick sheep, Lakeland’s own breed. She would talk more about the sheep than the books she wrote. She attended country shows and exhibitions showing and judging them.

Sadly, in old age, her sight deteriorated and she lost much of her vision. The last few stories she wrote were written for publication in the United States. Her critics say they did not match her earlier work in style or craftsmanship. She died from pneumonia just before Christmas in 1943. She was cremated, and her ashes were scattered by her husband William in New Sawrey at the south end of Esthwaite Water.

The Lake District has been a county that attracts poets, painters, writers and homegrown fox hunters that have songs written about them. For example, ‘D’ye Ken John Peel?’ about John Peel, a famous eighteenth-century Cumbrian huntsman. Like Dominic, Peel was from the Caldbeck area, a likeable rogue and a man prone to dissipation. His friend and neighbour John Woodcock Graves (1795–1886), wrote the lyrics to the song in the Cumbrian dialect and set them to the tune of a traditional Scottish song, called Bonnie Annie. Like Peel, Dominic also had poems and songs written about him.

Graves travelled to Tasmania from Caldbeck, where he lived out the rest of his life. I have the only remaining oil painting of him, but our paths cross on a personal matter. His eldest son John, a successful barrister, died as Dom did, before his father. I feel Grave’s pain almost one and half centuries later, I can see it in his portrait’s eyes.

The other thing that John Peel and Dominic, have in common is that they are both buried in St Kentigern’s Church, Peel in Caldbeck and Dom in Castle Sowerby, the parishes where they were born. Sadly, both of them have had their graves vandalised. Peels was damaged by anti-hunt protesters, one hundred and fifty years after his death, and Dom’s by an unknown assailant between the 4 – 6 May 2015, eighteen months after his death.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  FFS dad you no as well as I do who did it…

As is the Christian tradition, Dom’s grave faces to the east, so the Northern Massif landscape is behind him. He hasn’t turned his back on his beloved hills, in fact just the opposite, his grave basks in the sunrise from the east above Penrith and falls into shadow as the sun sets on the other side of High Pike and Caldbeck. It’s a passage of the sun he knows well, growing up at Vicargate two fields away from his grave. The church was founded by St Kentigern in the sixth century, or Mungo, as he was also known. He had a major influence on large areas of Cumbria, digging wells to baptise the hill dwellers and building several churches on his missionary journey from Scotland to Wales.

Legend has it, that Kentigern converted Merlin (Myrddin) to Christianity during his time in the Scottish Borders, as depicted in the stained-glass window in a church in Tweeddale

One of Dom’s favourite places to visit was Bowscale Tarn, an isolated hamlet named after St Mungo, nestled between Mosedale and Mungrisdale. As a man, he was often up there with Lucy. As a teenager, Dom worked at the Mill Inn, the only pub in Mungrisdale.

The tarn is a dark, brooding place. It’s 56 feet deep, but to Dom, it was an oasis of solitude and serenity. According to folklore, two immortal fish live in the tarn and it’s these fish that appear in Wordsworth’s 1888 poem, Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle.

Dom would mention the tarn in his texts and take pictures of Lucy on his phone fetching the sticks and tennis balls that he’d thrown into the enigmatic water.

                                                               there u go agen

                                   i don’t even no who this wordsworth gadg is

but ur right tho its the best place

lucy loved the water

According to Cumbrian legend, Mungo’s mother was a princess, the daughter of King Lleuddun who ruled the lands of Lothian in Scotland. She became pregnant after being raped by the son of Urien, the King of Rheged (c.590). In a twisted act of early medieval honour killing, her father had her thrown off Traprain Law, a hill in east Lothian.

She survived the fall and made her way across the River Forth to Fife. Mungo was born and brought up by Saint Serf who was ministering to the Picts. It was Serf who gave him his name, Mungo, which means ‘Dear Friend’. An anti-Christian movement in Strathclyde made it difficult for Mungo and he left the area and travelled to Wales, via Cumbria.

After a pilgrimage to Rome, he returned to Glasgow where a large community grew up around him. In old age, it is said that Mungo became very weak and was so feeble that his chin had to be kept in place with a bandage. He died in his bath.